Daily Digest 2/14 - New Market Highs, Is There a Middle Ground Between Renting a House and Buying?

Economy

The creditors, which include euro-area governments, are also constrained because giving in may embolden and boost other anti-austerity parties in the region such as Spain’s Podemos. Germany, as the biggest country contributor to Greece’s 240 billion-euro ($340 billion) twin bailouts and the chief proponent of economic reform and budget cuts in return, insists that Tsipras’s government commit to an extension of its current rescue program, which expires Feb. 28.

At the podium, Stockman’s expertise and experience cannot be matched, and he has a reputation for zesty financial straight talk. Defying right- and left-wing boxes, his latest book catalogues both the corrupters and defenders of sound money, fiscal rectitude, and free markets. Stockman discusses the forces that have left the public sector teetering on the edge of political dysfunction and fiscal collapse and have caused America’s financial system to morph into an unstable, bubble-prone gambling arena that undermines capitalist prosperity and showers speculators with vast windfall gains.

This is a hot money bubble. The Wall Street wiseguys had the opportunity for a new high and they have taken it, consequences be damned. The political animals will look the other way, as long as the campaign handouts keep coming, and justice is especially blind given the right career incentives.

The strong dollar may be painful for the real economy, but the benefit is that it attracts foreign investment in paper, and gives the Banks and the hedge funds the ability to buy up assets on the cheap. It increased the consolidation in commercial business, especially in the healthcare field which is ripe for the plucking.

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We have been fighting in the Middle East for 25 years. There have been no victories and no “mission accomplished.” Many needless deaths and dollars have been spent and yet we never reassess our policies of foreign interventionism. One would think after the humiliating defeat of the Republicans in 2008, as a reaction to the disastrous foreign policy of George W. Bush, that the American people would be more cautious in granting support to expanding our military presence in that region.

In the meantime, inbound cargo vessels continued to stack up at anchor, with 27 freighters left idle on Friday morning waiting for a berth outside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation's two busiest cargo hubs.

The numbers are likely to grow by the end of the weekend as additional vessels arrive from Asia with no place to park at the docks.

Boyd went from debtor to homeowner in just three years—from 2009 to 2012—thanks to an innovative-homeownership plan called the shared-equity program. It works like this: Champlain Housing Trust offers a down payment for a home, paid for with government funds. Then CHT screens potential buyers, who are members of the trust, based on their assets and income. (To qualify, a family of four must earn $80,200 or less in gross annual income, they must not own another home, and they must not have significant assets outside of savings for retirement.)

"What surprised us was how fast the smallpox stopped," Foege said. Within six months, the outbreak in Nigeria had been contained. Foege went on to lead the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and later earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom, largely for his work in developing the theory of ring vaccination. The World Health Organization officially declared smallpox eradicated in 1980. It had killed, by some estimates, more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone.

Dr. Lynch cautioned against an overly simplistic response to Islamic extremism and provided some of the historical and cultural context for ISIS and our challenges in the Middle East. My colleague Tulsi Gabbard asked a good question about whether or not we should continue with the fiction that Iraq, and perhaps Syria, are salvageable countries. And whether we should instead assist in the formation of autonomous regions or new States, which provide homelands for the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish populations there. Lynch argued that some kind of federal system is still needed and that creating a Sunni homeland is exactly what Isis is doing right now. I would argue that while that might be true, it shouldn’t in itself poison the idea and perhaps 100-years after Sykes-Picot it’s time to acknowledge that the lines don’t work, and the people of the Middle East should be allowed self-determination, peaceful if at all possible.

Gold & Silver

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